This two-day interdisciplinary conference hosted by the University of Kent aims to provide a forum for discussion and, through keynote lectures and selected presentations, to build a new understanding of the relationship between art and urban places.

We welcome abstracts from all scholars, including postgraduates and early career researchers, from a range of disciplines including art, architecture, geography, sociology, philosophy, anthropology, history, politics and economics and urban planning.

Artistic interventions in the permeable urban context can alter and often tamper the contours of the contemporary cityscape; they can also be critical in the development of new forms of urban culture. While providing a perfect arena for artists and researchers to investigate the consolidated mechanisms of art institutions and to challenge the normative regulations concerning the use of public spaces, the new practices of urban art enclose an organic civic participation and a conscious collective criticism. From this point of view, contemporary urban space seems to become the vessel for a new understanding of art that extends its reach to the community both locally and globally (through any digital dissemination), inviting participation and interaction and creating physical and virtual spaces for a new form of urban experience and aesthetic pleasure.

The question we investigate is:
In what way can urban art engage with its audiences and create public spaces – material, virtual or imagined – within which people can identify themselves, discover new forms of interaction with the community and shape new modes of aesthetic behaviours?

Examples of subjects for invited paper presentations, projects and works in progress include but are not limited to:
• Forms of urban art
• Street styles and urban behaviours
• Architecture and art
• Urban experience and digital re-enaction of physical interventions
• City culture and urban transformation
• Urban photography
• Film and the city
• Urban art as social and political protest
• Landscapes of urban art
• The street and its aesthetics
• Community interaction and architecture
• Negotiating public spaces
• Projects of artistic interventions in public spaces

Submission process
We invite submissions of short abstracts (500 words) on urban art and public spaces, plus a brief biography (100 words). The time slot for presentations is 20 minutes with a 15 minute session for questions at the end of each panel. Abstracts should be prepared for blind-refereeing.

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